Hermeneutical Naivete

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Carta to modern parliamentary democracy. And while Butterfields own use of the term was

somewhat inconsistent, the thrust of his argument was directed against present-centered

history, which he contrasted with more historical modes of inquiry that sought to

understand past actors on their own terms and with their own categories, rather than with

current conceptions and the retrospective vantage point occupied by historians.1 Butterfield

said, The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all

sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism.2 So

Butterfield laid the groundwork for identifying as spurious those historiographies that failed

to account for the contingency and alterity of the historical past: history does not consist of

the inevitable march of events leading to the present, nor do past concepts or beliefs

seamlessly map onto current ones, even if they do retain the same name.

Following this line, Quentin Skinner in 1969 picked up on some of these themes and

reinvigorated the debate within intellectual history. Skinner argued that there were entire sets

of mythologies about the causal efficacy and systematic intensions of thinkers and their

thoughts that taint the historians perspective and result in attributing to past actors

impossible positions and beliefs. The mythology of parochialism, for example, involves a

historical foreshortening whereby the observer may see something apparently (rather

than really) familiar in the course of studying an alien argument, and may in consequence

provide a misleadingly familiar-looking description.3 For Skinner, describing past agents

actions in terms they would not recognize themselves is to commit the methodological sin of

historical anachronism. All of Skinners mythologies concerned such sins, and the crux of

his thesis was that no agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which

he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done. 4

Skinner aims to establish a methodology that would render the true meaning of past texts and

actions based on the social context in which they were made. The central goal in route to this

method is recovering the intentions of past authors, which are situated within a socio-

linguistic framework that makes possible the meaning of any given utterance. For Skinner,

interpretation and understanding, insofar as they aim to be correct, are properly concerned

1 Jardine (2003), p. 1262 Butterfield (1931), p. 31-23 Skinner (1969), p. 24-54 Skinner (1969), p. 29


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with reconstructing these intentional contexts and making them the basis for the

interpretation of texts.

More recently, Andrew Cunningham has put forward a similar intentionality-based

thesis. The crux of Cunninghams argument turns upon identifying science as a specific,

actor-defined, intentional activity, which he intends to use as a criterion for the material that

can be legitimately included within the history of science.5 According to Cunningham,

science, as an intentional activity, began somewhere between 1780 and 1850.6 Thus,

including material before that period within the history of science amounts to a present-

centered history that imposes present categories upon past activities that the agents

themselves would not have recognized. In the course of his argument, Cunningham rightly

eschews the idea that the history of science concerns tracing the development of how the

Truth became visible to men and asserts, rather, that science is a human activity, wholly a

human activity, and nothing but a human activity.7 But Cunningham then turns to claim that

this human activity can only be understood, at least if we are to do history historically, by

adhering to past actors categories. To do otherwise would be hijack their actions and

statements into our contextand give them a post factum identity.8 Cunninghams thesis is

striking, then, precisely because the actors intentions are not only supposed to set the

parameters of meaning that we can glean from their activity, but also because they set the

(disciplinary) parameters of our current investigations.9

As should be clear by now, this debate is not solely limited to the historiography of

science; rather, its consequences extend much further to all areas of historical investigation

and explanation. Moreover, these problems point to the general hermeneutic, or interpretive,

character of all historical understanding. But before moving on to discuss the hermeneutic

aspects of this debate, there are two important features to note, the first of which is the focus

on intentionality. Butterfield, Skinner, Cunningham, and others for whom these are major

historiographical problems, are all concerned to get inside the heads of past agents. By

making intentional states the key to historical understanding, these thinkers claim that

transposing oneself into past frameworks is the only way to achieve authentic historical

understanding. Crucially, intentional states are recovered by the historian through a process

5 Cunningham (1988), p. 3736 Cunningham (1988), p. 3857 Cunningham (1988), p. 3738 Cunningham (1988), p. 3809 For two recent, rather more nuanced contributions to this debate, see Jardine (2000a) and Tosh (2003).


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of reconstructing the particular belief-system through which the intention acquires its

meaning. This reconstruction involves a complex synthesis of textual, biographical, and

social-historical knowledge so as to reconstitute the background against which specific

actions and utterances gain meaning. The second feature to note is the underlying

presupposition of method, which is exposed by presenting anachronism and presentism as

problems in the first place. Implicit in the presentation of these problems is the idea that

authentic understanding is possible only when the historian sets aside all of her present

concepts and categories and takes up a distinctive historical method that allows them

unmediated access to the past. One of the primary presuppositions of Butterfield, Skinner,

Cunningham, and others is that it is possible to transcend the present and transpose oneself

into the minds or conceptual frameworks of past actors. Consider, for example,

Cunninghams claim: To ask of people in the pastwhat their own description and

understanding of their own intentional activity was, and then to take seriously what we

learnis our means of getting out of the present, of transcending our present-centeredness

as historians of science.10

As we shall see, within the history of hermeneutics this attempt to transcend the

present and capture the past as it really was is inextricably linked to the search for a general

method that would put knowledge in the human sciences on as sure a path to objectivity as in

the natural sciences. Suspension of the present, so the line goes, is the key to an authentic

historical knowledge, untainted by contemporary concepts and understandings. When these

two features are combined, a general historiographical metaphor begins to emerge, namely,

that of the paradigm, the cognitive framework, or conceptual scheme. That it is possible to

reconstruct and get inside this closed, synchronic system of beliefs so as to recover the true

intentions of the author solely on their own terms is dependent upon taking the metaphor

of paradigm or conceptual scheme literally. As Nick Jardine has shown, no matter how

important Butterfields proclamation of the problems of anachronism and presentism may

seem to us today, the scholarly response at the time was less than overwhelming.11 In fact, I

suggest it is no coincidence that within the history of science these historiographical

problems re-emerge only in the late 1960s, after the intellectual upheaval brought about with

the publication of Kuhns Structure. Since then, the metaphor of paradigms or cognitive

frameworks has come to dominate much of the work done in the history and philosophy of

10 Cunningham (1988), p. 38311 Jardine (2003), p. 126


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science. That the debates over anachronism and presentism are dependent upon the metaphor

of the paradigm is clearest when one considers the hermeneutic strategies devised by various

historians (such as the ones mentioned above) to understand past forms of life that seem alien

or entirely different from our own. These radically different conceptions of the world, they

claim, can be understood only when the entire system of thought, which makes specific

beliefs possible, coherent, and meaningful, is reconstructed. And while this metaphor is

notoriously difficult to articulate precisely, it also presents a unique set of methodological

problems that manifest themselves in attempts to recover the original meaning of a text, or to

base interpretations off of the inferred intentions of the original author.

II.

In this section, I examine the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer with the

intent to shed light on the historiographical problems of anachronism and presentism.

Moreover, I explore these issues through Gadamers analysis of the focus on actors

intentional states, the search for a general historical method, and the broader metaphor of

paradigms and conceptual schemes.

Emphasizing the central importance of method to hermeneutics, Gadamer claims that

Schleiermacher, the first great modern hermeneuticist, sought a method of interpretation

through a unity of procedurenot differentiatedby the way the ideas are transmitted

whether in writing or orally, in a foreign language or in ones own.12 This search for an

adequate interpretive procedure continues throughout the Romantic hermeneutic tradition and

culminates with Dilthey, whose work embodies the last best attempt to put the

Geisteswissenschaften on the secure path of objective knowledge. For Gadamer, this entire

project is ill-founded precisely because it fails to account for the universal nature of the

hermeneutic experience. By attempting to establish a set of methodological rules that would

render knowledge in the human sciences as objective as that of the natural sciences, Dilthey,

according to Gadamer, dichotomized the hermeneutic situation and legitimated the dualism

of knowledge he was trying to undermine. Gadamers project aims to unify this divide by

showing that when the universality of the hermeneutic situation is properly understood, the

task of philosophical hermeneutics becomes not a project of working out appropriate methods

of interpretation, but the opening up of the hermeneutical dimension in its full scope,

showing its fundamental significance for our entire understanding of the world and thus for

12 Gadamer (1960), p. 179


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all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself.13 By universalizing the

hermeneutic experience, Gadamer claims that understanding and interpretation are always

already occurring. This transforms the hermeneutic experience into one that is operative in

all human activities, and not just textual or historical interpretation.

All understanding, then, is mediated by a set of hermeneutic structures. Within

Gadamers hermeneutic epistemology, the most important of such structures is that of

Vorurteile or prejudices. Gadamer attempts to rehabilitate the concept of prejudice,

which, since the Enlightenment, has been seen in an entirely negative way; prejudices were

those judgements that must be set aside so that reason can function without disturbance and a

true understanding can be reached. Against this conception of prejudice, Gadamer argues

that it is in fact impossible to set aside allof ones pre-judgements, as they are the necessary

ground from which all understanding begins. There are, to be sure, legitimate and

illegitimate prejudices, and it is the ongoing task of hermeneutical consciousness to bring

these prejudices into play and evaluate their efficacy and legitimacy.14 But the possibility of

rejecting all of ones prejudices wholesale is, Gadamer claims, an Enlightenment illusion; the

suspension of ones vantage point in history does not result in objectivity, but in the

elimination of the very ground upon which all understanding is built. Thus prejudices are

necessary aspects, and indeed preconditions of, any understanding whatsoever.

Prejudices, as Gadamer conceives them, are not simply arbitrary preferences or

opinions. Rather, prejudices are inextricably linked to the tradition in which we all

necessarily participate. Gadamer claims that, [i]n seeking to understand tradition historical

consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if

this preserved it from mixing in its own judgements and prejudices. It must, in fact, think

within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of

knowledge but makes it possible.15 Thus, prejudices are simply those pre-judgements

handed down to our understanding through the continuous development of tradition. All

knowledge and understanding is situated within a tradition, which constitutes both the

limiting and the transcendental conditions of meaning for any given text, utterance, or other

person. So knowledge and understanding, for Gadamer, are essentially and irreducibly

historical in character. He says,

13 Gadamer (1966), p. 1814 For more on the epistemological significance ofVorurteile, see Schmidt (1987).15 Gadamer (1960), p. 361


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In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand

ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-

evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity

is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the

closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more

than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.16

Gadamer claims the emphasis on individual subjectivity, wherein prejudices are isolated and

set aside so that pure reason may function properly, is fundamentally misguided. He traces

this idea to Schleiermacher, who sought to overcome the hermeneutic obstacles of

misunderstanding and error through a method of recovering actors intentions. By

reconstructing the original meanings of the author, Schleiermacher claimed, the interpreter

can understand the writer better then they understood themselves, thus rendering an authentic

interpretation.

Gadamer says that the evolving interpretation of this claim is the lens through which

the whole history of modern hermeneutics can be read.17 So while Gadamer does see the

attempt to reconstruct the authors original intention as central to the hermeneutical tradition,

it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the hermeneutical situation. Understanding

is always an understanding located in the present, and if the past is to have any significance at

all, it involves a necessary relation to the present. In this way, understanding is to be

thought of less as a subjective act than a participating in an event of tradition, a process of

transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.18 This ongoing process of

historical mediation is captured by Gadamers concept of Wirkungsgeschichte, or effective

history. Gadamer claims that, [c]onsciousness of being affected by history is primarily

consciousness of the hermeneutical situationWe always find ourselves within a situation,

and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished.19 Becoming aware of the

effects of history on our understanding and, conversely, the effects of our understanding on

history, is the mark of a hermeneutically sensitive consciousness. This, again, points to the

universality the always already character of hermeneutical experience, and that our

understanding can never escape the historical situation into which it is thrown.

Understanding is affected by, and affects, history.

16 Gadamer (1960), p. 27617 Gadamer (1960), p. 19218 Gadamer (1960), p. 29019 Gadamer (1960), p. 301


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Closely linked to his exegesis of Wirkungsgeschichte is Gadamers development of

the concept Horizontverschmelzung, or the fusion of horizons. Following Nietzsche and

Husserl, who both employed variations of the concept, Gadamer says, [e]very finite present

has its limitations. We define the concept of situation by saying that it represents a

standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is

the concept of horizon. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can

be seen from a particular vantage point.20 Thus we are situated within a horizon of meaning

and culture, and this situatedness determines the limits of our understanding: Understanding

tradition undoubtedly requires a historical horizon, then. But it is not the case that we acquire

this horizon by transposing ourselves into a historical situation. Rather we must always

already have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation. 21 All

understanding is a projection from ones current horizon into that of another horizon, and the

fusion that occurs is the event of understanding. Meaning, then, is not a passive entity to

be found objectively, or given, among the ruins of a text or utterance. Rather, understanding

is an active process whereby the text and interpreter participate in the event of meaning.

Gadamers appeal to horizons may, on first glimpse, suggest that he considers them

to be discrete, systematic entities that are closed off by social, historical, and cognitive limits.

This, however, is a misreading. That there are closed horizons past, alien, or both that are

inaccessible to our present understanding is, he says, a romantic refraction, a kind of

Robinson Crusoe dream of historical enlightenment, the fiction of an unattainable island, as

artificial as Crusoe himself. Against taking the concept of horizon as analogous to the

metaphor of paradigms or conceptual schemes mentioned above, Gadamer says,

Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding

with others, so too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an

abstraction. This historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never

absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon.

This horizon is, rather, something in to which we move and that moves with us.

Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which

all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion.22

20 Gadamer (1960), p. 30221 Gadamer (1960), p. 30522 Gadamer (1960), p. 304


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So the universality of the hermeneutic experience the fact that understanding and

interpretation are always already occurring works to undermine the metaphor of paradigms,

or what Karl Popper termed the myth of the framework.23 For Gadamer, horizons are not

paradigms, nor are they conceptual frameworks. Rather, they are individual vantage points

that expand or contract to the extent that the individual understands more widely.

In the exchange of horizons, however, something fundamentally applicative happens.

Following Aristotle, Gadamer characterizes the hermeneutical situation as being a mode of

phronesis, or practical understanding. Importantly for Gadamer, and unlike much of the

previous hermeneutic tradition, interpretation, understanding, and application are not separate

moments of the hermeneutical experience, but are simultaneous elements of the same

activity. In every act of understanding, a type of application occurs. Gadamer says:

The interpreter dealing with a traditionary text tries to apply it to himself. But this does

not mean that the text is given for him as something universal, that he first understands it

per se, and then afterward uses it for particular applications. Rather, the interpreter seeks

no more than to understand this universal, the text i.e., to understand what it says, what

constitutes the texts meaning and significance. In order to understand that, he must not

try to disregard himself and his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relate the text

to this situation if he wants to understand at all.24

Gadamers appropriation of Aristotles notion ofphronesis, then, serves both to unify the

concepts of prejudices, effective history, and horizon, but also stands as an example of how

past texts can speak to us in the present.25 By making phronesis central to the hermeneutic

situation, Gadamer makes every interpretation applicable to the situation of the interpreter.

Historical understanding, on Gadamers account, means relating the past text to the present

situation. Again, contrary to the idea that the past can speak to the present in an unmediated,

given way, Gadamer asserts that the relational aspect of understanding is central to the

hermeneutical process. Gadamer says: Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a

text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but

always a productive activity as well.26

23 Popper (1996), p. 3524 Gadamer (1960), p. 32425 For more on Gadamers appropriation of Aristotle, and the integral role of practical knowledge in

Gadamers hermeneutics, see Bernstein (1983) and Figal (1995).26 Gadamer (1960), p. 296


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Gadamer frames this relational aspect of understanding in terms of the logic of

question and answer. 27 All assertions and texts, Gadamer claims, can be seen in dialogical

relation to a given question. Citing Collingwood with approval, Gadamer claims that to

understand historical texts we must grasp the range of questions to which a given text may be

an intended answer: That a historical text is made the object of interpretation means that it

puts a question to the interpreter.28 Recalling the position that closed horizons are an

abstraction, Gadamer claims every historianmust reckon with the fundamental non-

definitiveness of the horizon in which his understanding moves. Historical tradition can be

understood only as something always in the process of being defined by the course of

eventsBy being re-actualized in understanding, texts are drawn into a genuine course of

events in exactly the same way as are events themselves.29 Past actors and their written

works, in other words, affect history only through their interpretations, not in and of

themselves. Texts and their effects are not a given encountered in history, but are rather a

part of history in and through their interpretations.

III.

I would now like to draw out more explicitly the consequences of a Gadamerian analysis of

the problems of anachronism and presentism. Returning to the two features discussed in

Section I, the first point to notice is where these problems fit into Gadamers philosophical

hermeneutic. Differentiating between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of anachronistic

and presentisitic categories to account for the historical past is clearly part of the ongoing

examination of prejudices or pre-judgements in our understanding. Put another way, the

problems of anachronism and presentism are not really problems within the

historiographical literature, but are more aptly considered aspects of the general task of

examining the legitimacy, efficacy, and utility of our explanatory language. Contrary to the

idea that it is possible to suspend wholesale our current conceptual understandings and our

current vantage point in history so as to reach an objective historical method, the problems of

anachronism and presentism highlight the way in which our historical consciousness itself

undergoes a transformation through the uncovering and questioning of prejudices. This

corresponds to the point of method mentioned above: from a Gadamerian point of view, there

27 By using the concept of dialogue or conversation, Gadamer also links together his more traditional

hermeneutic ideas of Section II ofTruth and Methodwith his discussion in Section III of language being

the medium and horizon of philosophical hermeneutics.28 Gadamer (1960), p. 36929 Gadamer (1960), p. 373


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is no special method by which historical understanding is rendered objective or authentic.

Rather, the point of historical consciousness is to continually expand both our understanding

of the past and our understanding of that understanding. Working out the ways in which

various explanations are acceptably or unacceptably anachronistic is just what historical

consciousness does. There are no hard and fast rules for the historian to adhere to so as to

write good history. History is good history when the historian is conscious of the way

history affects their understanding and the way they their understanding affects history.

By denying the possibility of methodologically suspending the present in ones

historical understanding, Gadamer also denies that recovering actor intentionality is the key

to proper understanding, if only because intentions are not historically researchable. Again,

texts do not affect history, their interpretations do. In this way, historical understanding is

interpretive all the way down, so to speak. The problem, as we have seen, is that positions

holding actor intentionality to be the basis of all interpretation presuppose that intentions can

present themselves in an unmediated, given way. In his explication of what is always

already occurring when we understand that we are applying, relating, and mediating the

past with the present Gadamer shows that history is not a static form of understanding.

Histories are not written to end history writing. Rather, they are written for some particular

purpose, by some individual person, and from some specific point in history.30

I also suggested that two central features of the problems of anachronism and

presentism, namely the search for method and the focus on intentionality, are both part of the

more general historiographical metaphor of paradigms or conceptual schemes. Gadamer

works to undermine the literalness of this metaphor in terms of historical understanding.

Rather than transposing ourselves into past conceptual frameworks, Gadamer argues that the

fusion of horizons is always already underway if any understanding whatsoever is present.

His analysis of the dialogical form of understanding functions to show how this occurs on the

historical level as well: the historians researches gain impetus from a real or live question

being asked. It is here, however, that a significant tension arises within Gadamers thinking

as to how we are to understand those questions that are no longer real for us in the present.

Importantly, this category of understanding is absolutely central to the history of science, a

30 This type of claim i.e. that one cannot escape to a vantage point outside of history worries quite a few

thinkers, not the least of which is Habermas and his criticisms of Gadamers hermeneutics as lacking

features necessary for an adequate ideology critique. For more on this debate, see Habermas (1977),

Gadamer (1967), and Warnke (1987).


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conceptual schemes. Inextricably linked to this metaphor is the notion of

incommensurability, or the idea that there are frameworks so radically different from our own

that it is impossible to reconcile them so as to reach a mutual understanding. Both of these

ideas rest on the supposition that it is possible to go native and understand an alien culture

on its own terms and without the prejudicial influences of the interpreters perspective. In

short, the myth of the given is still operative in these accounts, and to counteract these

Gadamer reiterates the point that the hermeneutical situation is one wherein understanding

and interpretation are always already occurring. As soon as a seemingly incommensurable

paradigm is presented, the hermeneutical consciousness is at work. Understanding is always

on the march, and mediation, application, and interpretation are all part of its ongoing

processes.

Thus, the historical nature of historical understanding is the central lesson of

Gadamers hermeneutics. The type of historical understanding Gadamer rejects, then, is

precisely the type that is exemplified by the hypostatization of the problems of anachronism

and presentism. This type of historiography fails to account for the dynamic nature of

historical understanding itself and remains committed to the nave position that a general

historical method can be uncovered so as to render historical knowledge objective. Merely

historical understanding, as Gadamer calls it, fails to account for the second, present-

centered level of questions that must be active within the historians own horizon so as to

motivate research into any given area. Without this level of questioning, the historians

research loses its relevancy. Gadamer says that we think we understand when we see the

past from a historical standpoint i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try

to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in

the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves.34 This relevancy to the present,

in the end, is what hermeneutically sophisticated history is all about.

34 Gadamer (1960), p. 303


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References:

Butterfield, H. (1931). The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell & Sons.

Bernstein, R. (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and

Praxis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Cunningham, A. (1988). Getting the game right: Some plain words on the identity and

invention of science. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 19, 365-

389.

Figal, G. (1995). Phronesis as Understanding: Situational Philosophical Hermeneutics. In

The Spectre of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical

Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1960). Truth and Method. Second, Revised Translation by Joel

Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall in 2002. New York: Continuum Press.

-----. (1966). The universality of the hermeneutic problem. In Philosophical Hermeneutics,

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-----. (1967). The scope and function of hermeneutical reflection. In Philosophical

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-----. (1988). Reason in the Age of Science. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence.

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Jardine, N. (2000a). Uses and abuses of anachronism in the history of the sciences.

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-----. (2000b). The scenes of inquiry: On the reality of questions in the sciences.

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-----. (2003). Whigs and stories: Herbert Butterfield and the historiography of science.

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Skinner, Q. (1969). Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas. History and

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